21st Century Emdangered Species Transparency Act

Floor Speech

Mr. LANKFORD. Mr. Chairman, if I were to ask most Americans, why do we have the Endangered Species Act?, just about all of them would say, so we can protect endangered species and increase those population numbers. But then you ask the question of each specific species, what is the goal? And very rarely now will you hear the goal being to increase population. You will hear things like protection of habitat, expansion of the species and such, but you are not going to hear population numbers.

What effect does that have? Well, come to Oklahoma some time. In western Oklahoma, we deal with a beautiful little ground chicken called the lesser prairie chicken. The lesser prairie chicken in the past month and a half has been listed as a threatened species now.

So what is the result of that? Well, the first question we ask is: What is the number that we need to have to recover? I don't know. We are just going to try to recover habitat.

What that means is they are now trying to block in 8,000 to 9,000 acres at a time of grassland and say no one can do development on these 8,000 to 9,000-acre blocks of land--that is no building, that is no construction, that is no energy, and that is no wind power, blocking it off and leaving it natural, up to 70 percent of that area. Suddenly, private lands have suddenly become the ownership of public lands.

The simple question is: How many lesser prairie chickens do we need to have before these restrictions go away? We don't know.

The latest survey that just came out showed a 20 percent increase from last year to this year. Is that enough? No. Fish and Wildlife Service is not required to take in that specific study. If it came from a State and from the people that lived there and know it best, shouldn't we take that advice?

For some strange reason--I am not opposed to scientists from New York--but if scientists from New York can pop in on Oklahoma and can say, I am going to give you the best science, and when we ask for the data behind it, they can say, no, it is secret and proprietary, and we can't do a thing about it, that doesn't make common sense.

Mr. Chairman, this bill fixes that. I encourage the House to pass it and support commonsense legislation.

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